One shelf in the museum is particularly instructive.  We called it the “Chamber of Horrors,” after the manner of Marlborough House, and it contains numbers of the sham antiquities, the manufacture of which is a regular thing in Mexico, as it is in Italy.  They are principally vases and idols of earthenware, for the art of working obsidian is lost, and there can be no trickery about that[18]; and as to the hammers, chisels, and idols in green jade, serpentine, and such like hard materials, they are decidedly cheaper to find than to make.  The Indians in Mexico make their unglazed pottery just as they did before the Conquest, so that, if they imitate real antiques exactly, there is no possibility of detecting the fraud; but when they begin to work from their own designs, or even to copy from memory, they are almost sure to put in something that betrays them.

As soon as the Spaniards came, they began to introduce drawing as it was understood in Europe; and from that moment the peculiarities of Mexican art began to disappear.  The foreheads of the Mexican races are all very low, and their painters and sculptors even exaggerated this peculiarity, to make the faces they depicted more beautiful,—­so producing an effect which to us Europeans seems hideously ugly, but which is not more unnatural than the ideal type of beauty we see in the Greek statues.  After the era of the Spaniards we see no more of such foreheads; and the eyes, which were drawn in profiles as one sees them in the full face, are put in their natural position.  The short squat figures become slim and tall; and in numberless little details of dress, modelling, and ornament, the acquaintance of the artist with European types is shown; and it is very seldom that the modern counterfeiter can keep clear of these and get back to the old standard.

Among the things on the condemned shelf were men’s faces too correctly drawn to be genuine, grotesque animals that no artist would ever have designed who had not seen a horse, head-dresses and drapery that were European and not Mexican.  Among the figures in Mayer’s Mexico, a vase is represented as a real antique, which, I think, is one of the worst cases I ever noticed.  There is a man’s head upon it, with long projecting pointed nose and chin, a long thin pendant moustache, an eye drawn in profile, and a cap.  It is true the pure Mexican race occasionally have moustaches, but they are very slight, not like this, which falls in a curve on both sides of the mouth; and no Mexican of pure Indian race ever had such a nose and chin, which must have been modelled from the face of some toothless old Spaniard.

Mention must be made of the wooden drums—­teponaztli—­of which some few specimens are still to be seen in Mexico.  Such drums figured in the religious ceremonies of the Aztecs, and one often hears of them in Mexican history.  I have mentioned already the great drum which Bernal Diaz saw when he went up the Mexican teocalli with Cortes, and which he describes as a hellish instrument, made with skins of great serpents; and which, when it was struck, gave a loud and melancholy sound, that could be heard at two leagues’ distance.  Indeed, they did afterwards hear it from their camp a mile or two off, when their unfortunate companions were being sacrificed on the teocalli.